The 'heavy lifting' you are referring to is exactly what we dont want. It's a mature product. It doesnt NEED features added and design changed every week to 'stay competitive' that's exactly what killed it. A mature and stable team that can put out bugfixes when needed will do fine, thank you.
"there were times when I had to use IE occasionally, because dumb webdesigners made it work only with IE. But I was using FF or some other browser, because it was superior in every other aspect."
EXACTLY. Those are the moments when you knew FF was doing it right, that made you more, not less loyal to FF. But then some suit somewhere figured that this would cause you to switch to IE full time (instead of reminding you why you avoid it) and so they ordered the developers to make FF more like the other browsers.
Funny enough, the more they work on that, the fewer users they have left.
Of course they had a choice. That is not even a serious question.
They are losing market share and their actions will accelerate, not reverse, that trend, just as previous missteps have done. And yes, life will go on, but a great opportunity has been lost. Firefox still has enough users that this matters, and they are throwing their weight behind DRM, and against the open web they claim to stand for at a critical moment. The notion this will get anyone to switch (back) to Firefox is ludicrous. The ones that left because they wanted something more like the other browsers are happy with their other browser, and the rest of us see this is a stab in the back not a feature.
"So, to take your music and drama example: the way to deal with that is for the school to choose the pupils with the best potential in those specialisms."
I am not even sure what you are trying to say here. Schools do not normally get to pick their pupils, and what about getting good teachers in these specialties and giving them what they need to create the right environment?
"Parental choice is again pointless. You might think your child's violin playing is exceptional, and make the choice for that music school. But your child shouldn't get that place ahead of some child that's an even better violinist."
You may not be the best person to judge if your child's violin playing is exceptional, but still the best judge by far of whether or not he actually wants to pursue it. And guess what? That's far more important to his long-term success in the field anyway.
"If it turns out that there aren't enough schools specialising in music and drama, then the constructive course of action is to set up more such schools (or repurpose existing ones.) Again, parental choice does nothing useful."
Except that without parental choice you have no way to even know whether there are enough, or too many, schools of a particular type, or to do anything about it even if you did know!
"School choice is pointless. Every parent wants the same thing - the best education for their child."
But nonetheless you abstract too much when you abstract away the differences between each child.
One of my Swedish hosts had 3 children. Two went to one school (top-ranked for arts; music and drama - the goals that two of her children had) while one went to another (a more hard-science oriented place because that was where his goals lay.) That choice was not pointless. Not at all.
"A choice of bad schools is no choice at all, and a choice of good schools is irrelevant."
The first part is closer to truth but neither are actually true. Again, you are abstracting too much. You may have a choice of poor schools but one may still be a better choice for a particular child than another.
"The effort should be spent on bringing the bad schools up to scratch, or closing them."
You act as if all schools were either good or bad and all in one class were equivalent to each other. That's just not true, no matter how right it sounds after over-simplifying the problem.
"It's useful, I don't know if it's convenient. Most sites won't even load anymore if you have Javascript turned off."
It's a huge timesaver. If they are not returning a webpage I figure that out immediately and move on to another site that does. With default settings on a modern browser you can only figure that out later through more subtle clues, and in the meantime you have infected your machine.
While I agree with your first paragraph the second is rot. Europe has tons of ridiculous old laws that everyone just ignores. The US is closer to what you want than Europe, we are just breaking our own system apart by mounding up way too many laws in a culture that tells us that whatever is on the books should be enforced.
"Or the Transit Authority can lower the monthly cost for a full time rider to $14.99, and get the government to covere the difference from tax revenue. It is a socialist country you know."
It has that reputation, the social democrats ruled post WWII for a very long time and spent their peace dividend on the welfare state. But in some ways it still seems less socialist than the US, having lived both places. Their school system would be seen as an extreme right-wing proposal here I am afraid, which is a shame, as it's a damn good one.
"Just increase the tax on petrol (or whatever is Swedish for gasoline)"
It's called bensin. And it's already taxed to punitive levels increases in tax wont increase revenues. Same is true for Alcohol and Tobacco of course.
It's simply not a workable rule and I would not be at all surprised if the penalty for ignoring it were less than the ultimate cost of implementation. And once it's implemented, once google invests in people to process these requests, and alters their own infrastructure to accommodate them, what is the result? It simply makes the competition more attractive and more people will use other search engines.
And dont tell me this will be enforced uniformly on every search engine regardless of size, hosting nation, etc. - it wont be and cannot be. Any engine hosted outside of Europe and without business operations in Europe is outside of their jurisdiction.
So of course google is going to resist this, actively if they can, passively if they cannot.
And again, it's perfectly fair at one level, but (depending on how rigidly they enforce it) it could also be a disaster where customers wind up with HP and RH pointing fingers at each other. Only time will tell.
I dont see any references to pureleads on slashdot currently, so either 1) you are getting a different page than I am or 2) it's not on slashdot, it's a local infection of your machine.
If you are on windows 2) is almost certainly correct.
"Admittedly, I've had a great many pretty awesome male coworkers, but I've also run into a fair bit of crap, and it does get exhausting and demoralizing over time."
It does, but it's not like that is happening because of your genital configuration. I bet you have plenty of male coworkers that feel the exact same way.
In this case, because OpenStack is something RedHat is pushing hard and encouraging multiple companies to jump in on. That does not in and of itself mean they will support other companies implementations, of course, but it might be a reasonable expectation that they would at least be somewhat less than totally rigid about it.
When you put up a line for your support staff and say 'support x but not y' you open up a situation where if it's not CLEAR that X is really the problem, they dont want to do anything but push you to another service. So I can envisage some very angry customers shuttling back and forth between HP and RH with the vendors just pointing their fingers at each other and no progress being made on a resolution for the customer. Probably not something that will encourage broader OpenStack adoption, fair or not.
Pureleads is adware/malware. Whitelisting it will just get you worse.
I recommend blacklisting it, along with slashdot.org and fsdn as well. It wont let you metamoderate but the more people that complain about it the more chance someone might finally fix that bug, after more than a decade. The rest of the site is still functional, as long as you are a logged in user, disable all scripting and over-ride the fugly fonts at least.
You should ask yourself why Firefox's userbase is shrinking though. And that has a lot to do with crappy decisions like this. The Firefox userbase was gained by being the better browser, without activex driveby attacks and with prompts before activating plugins.
Every time they get more like the other browsers (supposedly because they are afraid of using losers) they lose more users (because their userbase was attracted to different values than they now pursue.)
So it's a self-defeating strategy. And in the meantime the one force left on the web that still could have had some effect is refusing to even try. RIP Firefox. We had some good times.
There are plenty of good text editors. Most are actually very old programs though, which makes sense. Editing text was one of the most pressing problems, and thus of the first to be solved. Emacs, vi, even ed are still around and quite usable. TSE is also a very good editor, you might remember qedit? I still havent found another editor that handles columns so neatly. But whatever you do stick with a 'text editor' rather than a 'word processor.' The latter term refers to a program that tries to be a text editor AND a DTP engine in one, and of course fails horribly at doing either job properly as a consequence.
Dos can access a lot more than 640k - the limit on real mode access is 1mb. The EMS interface can handle multiple megabytes of expanded memory, using a scrolling pageframe usually set to 64k. This memory would simply be mapped into a dedicated section of the first megabyte of address space and accessed just like any other memory, except that when the program was done with one 64k segment it would shift a pointer and keep reading the next segment through the same addressing window.
With the 286 processor another mode became available that allowed direct addressing of extended RAM, and with the 386 the EMS interface became generalized and supplemented with virtual memory.
So if you are thinking you have to fit everything in 640k with Dos I am sorry, you are mistaken.
"Translation: We don't like this, but if we boycott it we are going to lose users to browsers run by companies more concerned about keeping media companies happy so they can keep licensing content."
That's what they are saying, but it's not credible.
It's like saying 'we want to win the fight, but if we fight we might lose, so we are going to give up and not fight instead.'
If you want to fight then fight. I'd back you. If you are not going to fight, then just admit it and shut up about it, quit blowing smoke up my arse that you care when your actions show you do not.
"The problem is that Mozilla has thrown away the power that comes from being able to speak for hundreds of millions of users out of fear of losing some of those users. That's a path to irrelevancy, they've traded the vision that made them popular in the first place for the hope of maintaining marketshare. It is a total MBA move, as if Mozilla should be driven by profits instead of advocacy."
EXACTLY! Insightful.
They got the marketshare because the technically clued recommended it to our family and friends. That has slowed essentially to a stop over the last few years, as Mozilla throws out everything that we cared about, supposedly to please the less technical users. Who will be switching to something else the next time we have to clean up the computer...
The only reason they have any market share at all left is because the highest profile competitors are both still worse. But Pale Moon seems to be a decent alternative and the word is spreading.
Obviously you are correct. A UI which exposes control interfaces to the user is bad. The future is to expose control interfaces ONLY to remote ad agencies, and keep the dirty users in their place.
PaleMoon is a Firefox fork that appears to be doing very well. I dont know for sure, but I suspect they will correctly sort this into the unwanted features bucket and skip it.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'heavy lifting' you are referring to is exactly what we dont want. It's a mature product. It doesnt NEED features added and design changed every week to 'stay competitive' that's exactly what killed it. A mature and stable team that can put out bugfixes when needed will do fine, thank you.
"there were times when I had to use IE occasionally, because dumb webdesigners made it work only with IE. But I was using FF or some other browser, because it was superior in every other aspect."
EXACTLY. Those are the moments when you knew FF was doing it right, that made you more, not less loyal to FF. But then some suit somewhere figured that this would cause you to switch to IE full time (instead of reminding you why you avoid it) and so they ordered the developers to make FF more like the other browsers.
Funny enough, the more they work on that, the fewer users they have left.
Of course they had a choice. That is not even a serious question.
They are losing market share and their actions will accelerate, not reverse, that trend, just as previous missteps have done. And yes, life will go on, but a great opportunity has been lost. Firefox still has enough users that this matters, and they are throwing their weight behind DRM, and against the open web they claim to stand for at a critical moment. The notion this will get anyone to switch (back) to Firefox is ludicrous. The ones that left because they wanted something more like the other browsers are happy with their other browser, and the rest of us see this is a stab in the back not a feature.
RIP Firefox Long Live PaleMoon.
"So, to take your music and drama example: the way to deal with that is for the school to choose the pupils with the best potential in those specialisms."
I am not even sure what you are trying to say here. Schools do not normally get to pick their pupils, and what about getting good teachers in these specialties and giving them what they need to create the right environment?
"Parental choice is again pointless. You might think your child's violin playing is exceptional, and make the choice for that music school. But your child shouldn't get that place ahead of some child that's an even better violinist."
You may not be the best person to judge if your child's violin playing is exceptional, but still the best judge by far of whether or not he actually wants to pursue it. And guess what? That's far more important to his long-term success in the field anyway.
"If it turns out that there aren't enough schools specialising in music and drama, then the constructive course of action is to set up more such schools (or repurpose existing ones.) Again, parental choice does nothing useful."
Except that without parental choice you have no way to even know whether there are enough, or too many, schools of a particular type, or to do anything about it even if you did know!
"School choice is pointless. Every parent wants the same thing - the best education for their child."
But nonetheless you abstract too much when you abstract away the differences between each child.
One of my Swedish hosts had 3 children. Two went to one school (top-ranked for arts; music and drama - the goals that two of her children had) while one went to another (a more hard-science oriented place because that was where his goals lay.) That choice was not pointless. Not at all.
"A choice of bad schools is no choice at all, and a choice of good schools is irrelevant."
The first part is closer to truth but neither are actually true. Again, you are abstracting too much. You may have a choice of poor schools but one may still be a better choice for a particular child than another.
"The effort should be spent on bringing the bad schools up to scratch, or closing them."
You act as if all schools were either good or bad and all in one class were equivalent to each other. That's just not true, no matter how right it sounds after over-simplifying the problem.
"It's useful, I don't know if it's convenient. Most sites won't even load anymore if you have Javascript turned off."
It's a huge timesaver. If they are not returning a webpage I figure that out immediately and move on to another site that does. With default settings on a modern browser you can only figure that out later through more subtle clues, and in the meantime you have infected your machine.
While I agree with your first paragraph the second is rot. Europe has tons of ridiculous old laws that everyone just ignores. The US is closer to what you want than Europe, we are just breaking our own system apart by mounding up way too many laws in a culture that tells us that whatever is on the books should be enforced.
School choice is considered a far-right agenda here. Our left-wing has no idea how much they worship Prussian proto-fascists.
"Or the Transit Authority can lower the monthly cost for a full time rider to $14.99, and get the government to covere the difference from tax revenue. It is a socialist country you know."
It has that reputation, the social democrats ruled post WWII for a very long time and spent their peace dividend on the welfare state. But in some ways it still seems less socialist than the US, having lived both places. Their school system would be seen as an extreme right-wing proposal here I am afraid, which is a shame, as it's a damn good one.
"Just increase the tax on petrol (or whatever is Swedish for gasoline)"
It's called bensin. And it's already taxed to punitive levels increases in tax wont increase revenues. Same is true for Alcohol and Tobacco of course.
Most Americans really have no idea how big Africa really is. This may help:
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/true-size-of-africa.jpg
Another bit of geography Americans often cannot grasp:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/07/the-less-americans-know-about-ukraines-location-the-more-they-want-u-s-to-intervene/
Interesting correlation there.
It's simply not a workable rule and I would not be at all surprised if the penalty for ignoring it were less than the ultimate cost of implementation. And once it's implemented, once google invests in people to process these requests, and alters their own infrastructure to accommodate them, what is the result? It simply makes the competition more attractive and more people will use other search engines.
And dont tell me this will be enforced uniformly on every search engine regardless of size, hosting nation, etc. - it wont be and cannot be. Any engine hosted outside of Europe and without business operations in Europe is outside of their jurisdiction.
So of course google is going to resist this, actively if they can, passively if they cannot.
And again, it's perfectly fair at one level, but (depending on how rigidly they enforce it) it could also be a disaster where customers wind up with HP and RH pointing fingers at each other. Only time will tell.
I dont see any references to pureleads on slashdot currently, so either 1) you are getting a different page than I am or 2) it's not on slashdot, it's a local infection of your machine.
If you are on windows 2) is almost certainly correct.
LMGTFY:
http://malwaretips.com/blogs/pureleads-virus-removal/
"Admittedly, I've had a great many pretty awesome male coworkers, but I've also run into a fair bit of crap, and it does get exhausting and demoralizing over time."
It does, but it's not like that is happening because of your genital configuration. I bet you have plenty of male coworkers that feel the exact same way.
"And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no."
For electricity? Perhaps.
But the need to maintain control of their own documents is no less for a lawyer than a Hospital, as any lawyer would tell you.
In this case, because OpenStack is something RedHat is pushing hard and encouraging multiple companies to jump in on. That does not in and of itself mean they will support other companies implementations, of course, but it might be a reasonable expectation that they would at least be somewhat less than totally rigid about it.
When you put up a line for your support staff and say 'support x but not y' you open up a situation where if it's not CLEAR that X is really the problem, they dont want to do anything but push you to another service. So I can envisage some very angry customers shuttling back and forth between HP and RH with the vendors just pointing their fingers at each other and no progress being made on a resolution for the customer. Probably not something that will encourage broader OpenStack adoption, fair or not.
Pureleads is adware/malware. Whitelisting it will just get you worse.
I recommend blacklisting it, along with slashdot.org and fsdn as well. It wont let you metamoderate but the more people that complain about it the more chance someone might finally fix that bug, after more than a decade. The rest of the site is still functional, as long as you are a logged in user, disable all scripting and over-ride the fugly fonts at least.
You should ask yourself why Firefox's userbase is shrinking though. And that has a lot to do with crappy decisions like this. The Firefox userbase was gained by being the better browser, without activex driveby attacks and with prompts before activating plugins.
Every time they get more like the other browsers (supposedly because they are afraid of using losers) they lose more users (because their userbase was attracted to different values than they now pursue.)
So it's a self-defeating strategy. And in the meantime the one force left on the web that still could have had some effect is refusing to even try. RIP Firefox. We had some good times.
There are plenty of good text editors. Most are actually very old programs though, which makes sense. Editing text was one of the most pressing problems, and thus of the first to be solved. Emacs, vi, even ed are still around and quite usable. TSE is also a very good editor, you might remember qedit? I still havent found another editor that handles columns so neatly. But whatever you do stick with a 'text editor' rather than a 'word processor.' The latter term refers to a program that tries to be a text editor AND a DTP engine in one, and of course fails horribly at doing either job properly as a consequence.
Dos can access a lot more than 640k - the limit on real mode access is 1mb. The EMS interface can handle multiple megabytes of expanded memory, using a scrolling pageframe usually set to 64k. This memory would simply be mapped into a dedicated section of the first megabyte of address space and accessed just like any other memory, except that when the program was done with one 64k segment it would shift a pointer and keep reading the next segment through the same addressing window.
With the 286 processor another mode became available that allowed direct addressing of extended RAM, and with the 386 the EMS interface became generalized and supplemented with virtual memory.
So if you are thinking you have to fit everything in 640k with Dos I am sorry, you are mistaken.
Handing it off to a video player for decoding is... exactly what a browser should do when it gets a video file. What's the problem?
"Translation: We don't like this, but if we boycott it we are going to lose users to browsers run by companies more concerned about keeping media companies happy so they can keep licensing content."
That's what they are saying, but it's not credible.
It's like saying 'we want to win the fight, but if we fight we might lose, so we are going to give up and not fight instead.'
If you want to fight then fight. I'd back you. If you are not going to fight, then just admit it and shut up about it, quit blowing smoke up my arse that you care when your actions show you do not.
"The problem is that Mozilla has thrown away the power that comes from being able to speak for hundreds of millions of users out of fear of losing some of those users. That's a path to irrelevancy, they've traded the vision that made them popular in the first place for the hope of maintaining marketshare. It is a total MBA move, as if Mozilla should be driven by profits instead of advocacy."
EXACTLY! Insightful.
They got the marketshare because the technically clued recommended it to our family and friends. That has slowed essentially to a stop over the last few years, as Mozilla throws out everything that we cared about, supposedly to please the less technical users. Who will be switching to something else the next time we have to clean up the computer...
The only reason they have any market share at all left is because the highest profile competitors are both still worse. But Pale Moon seems to be a decent alternative and the word is spreading.
Obviously you are correct. A UI which exposes control interfaces to the user is bad. The future is to expose control interfaces ONLY to remote ad agencies, and keep the dirty users in their place.
PaleMoon is a Firefox fork that appears to be doing very well. I dont know for sure, but I suspect they will correctly sort this into the unwanted features bucket and skip it.